Measurement of Neutral Current π⁰ Cross Section on Argon in MicroBooNE

MicroBooNE is a short-baseline neutrino oscillation experiment located on the Booster Neutrino Beam at Fermilab. MicroBooNE’s primary goal is to investigate the anomalous excess of low energy events in MicroBooNE’s predecessor, MiniBooNE, which could be attributed to electron-like or photon-like signals. To test the photon-like hypothesis, MicroBooNE has performed the first search for single photon events, a likely source of which is the neutral current (NC) Δ radiative decay. NC π⁰ production is the dominant background for this search because mis-reconstructed photon showers from π⁰ decay mimic single photon events. Calculating the NC π⁰ cross section will improve the modeling of this background channel, reducing uncertainties in measuring single photon production processes in MicroBooNE. In this talk, I will report the first measurement of the NC π​​​​​​​⁰ cross section for neutrino-argon interactions at O(1GeV) energies. I will present the NC π​​​​​​​⁰ signal selection criteria adapted from the single-photon search, the methodology for calculating the cross section measurement, and the resulting NC π​​​​​​​​​​​​​​⁰ cross-section in argon.